Allow date to be cleared in triggers and automations

HI Dale Bone and Carlos Santos thanks so much for providing your feedback. We are always looking for ways to improve.

While the ability to clear fields via triggers and automations isn't currently on our roadmap, I've captured this in our feedback tool to prioritize as we start to look at expanding the available conditions and actions. 

Clearing dates would be useful, but clearing ANY fields would be perfect. Like text fields, for instance.

I'd like to add my support for triggers (any maybe automations) gaining the ability to clear a date field. 

We use the date field all the time. However if a case is solved but then reopened at a later date the date field still shows the last date that was set by an agent. Ideally we'd like this cleared as it can cause confusion in our teams.

Hey Kieran Thorpe thanks for laying that out!

We do something similar with our On Hold tickets, but I think the key difference to avoid the issue you face is we have a third automation.

3) Reopen tickets on hold after due date

IF status is on hold & hours since on hold is greater than 72 & hours since due date is greater than 72 THEN set status to Open

Could that be a workaround for you?

(Regardless of workaround, I still agree with the idea of being able to clear due date!)

Hi Stephen Belleau I can indeed.

I'll give a scenario and then explain how we implemented this.

A user contacts our support team and lets say they need time to be with the user in person but they are not free or available until a weeks time. We will book an appointment with them and then utilize task and due date placing the ticket on hold.

The date comes, some work is completed but we need to then work with a 3rd party and place our ticket on hold awaiting an update.

Unfortunately this leads to an issue, I don't want tickets to sit on hold for long periods of time, our agents often forget about tickets they've placed on hold and they can go stale. To combat this I have an automation that takes tickets off hold after a few days. However if something is scheduled I don't want those tickets to come off hold prematurely.

because a due date has been set at some point, this ticket is now effectively able to stay on hold indefinitely.

the triggers and automations responsible work like this:

Trigger

1) Tag a ticket if there is a due date

- If due date is present, add tag due_date_pending

Automations

1) Take ticket off hold on due date

- IF hours until due date less than 2 & contains none of the following tag due_date_passed THEN set status open, set priority urgent, add tag due_date_passed, remove tag due_date_pending

n.b you need to add a tag to stop this looping, and the removing of the other tag as i mentioned is immediately undone by the trigger

2) Take ticket off hold after 3 days

- IF status  is on hold & hours since on hold is greater than 72 & contains none of the following tag due_date_pending THEN set status to Open

I know I can make the trigger ignore any tickets that have the due_date_passed tag as well, but this creates more nightmares if lets say a new date needs to be set in the future again, i have to open the tags field up to my agents and let them edit/delete them manually (something were trying to avoid).

Simply clearing the due date field would make this so much cleaner and easier.

Kieran Thorpe I feel like there should be a way to work around that issue. Could you elaborate on the problem you're trying to solve, and what conditions/actions you've set up in your trigger/automation? 

It is frustrating; this does seem like a fundamental gap in functionality.

I think you know this already, Kieran, but for the record -- just because an issue has been open a long time doesn't mean that it will percolate to the top and be implemented. There will always be more plausible features wanted by some people than are feasible to implement.

This fix seems like a logical no-brainer, but that might just be my own stake in it!

This is super frustrating and i dont understand how something that was opened so long ago is still not implemented? It seems like common and basic functionality that should exist.

We stick tickets on hold with a due date in the future and utilise a trigger to tag them, we then have an automation that sets their priority / and open status once the due date is met

The annoyance comes where the automation clears the initial tag but the trigger instantly re adds it as it detects a due date and there is no way to clear it.

If there is more work to be done or the date needs amending and the ticket needs to be put on hold for another reason it causes havok / manual work removing tags or due dates etc.

Hi all, thanks for sharing your feedback. I appreciate you highlighting this gap in the current product functionality. Whilst it's not something we're implementing at this moment in time, it's on our radar as a potential improvement as we're rethinking triggers and automations in the coming year. Thanks again for sharing - it's always helpful to understand what's top of mind for customers as we develop our roadmaps.